Platte County may not be a crossroads of country music, but in our history we’re not without our moments. We’ve had pickers, crooners and dreamers.
Bill Graham
This is on my mind because the recent Country Music series on PBS by Ken Burns was excellent. If you missed it, catch it the next time it airs locally on KCPT public television. If you love country, folk and bluegrass music, it’s a must-see. Many streams of music feed into what falls under the category as “country.” Burns and crew showed that America’s social changes, painful or positive, were tied to the music along with themes such as love won or lost. The music and changes rolled through Platte County, too.
I confess that I’ve only seen the last four episodes of the eight-part documentary. During the first week that Country Music aired, I was camped at the Walnut Valley Music Festival at Winfield, Kan. One of the world’s great music festivals is almost a half century old and still rolling. Along with 8,000 to 12,000 other acoustic music diehards, myself and friends played acoustic guitars, mandolins, fiddles, banjos and dog-house basses morning, noon and night. The festival is everything that Woodstock was reputed to be, without electric instruments and the wildest excesses of Woodstock.
I wish we had a miniature version in Platte County. But festivals and special events are a lot of work for someone. Just ask the people who just completed Applefest in Weston, Pioneer Days in Edgerton and Parkville Days. Those are local or regional festivals. Winfield is a world festival, heavy with Midwesterner attendance, but also with contingents from Japan and many other countries attending.
It’s funny, though, how musical paths will cross. I was sitting playing music with friends when a stranger sat down on my left and asked if he could pick with us. “Sure,” we said. Musicians and singers intermingle rather freely at festivals. We played a tune or two and I decided that the stranger looked vaguely familiar. “Where are you from,” I asked. “A little town called Weston, Missouri,” he said.
“Well I’ll be, it’s Ted Cline,” I said.
And it was the country singer who for several years ran an opry-style country music show at the New Deal Tobacco Warehouse in Weston. Ted and his brother, Kevin Cline, were taking a stab at making it in the music business when I arrived in the county in 1981. They eventually took separate paths. But both have appeared at the Platte County Fair and other places. Ted was tapped as a fiddle contest judge at the fair during one of the years I played my three tunes, just to be a participant. Out of several thousand camps at Winfield, he and family members had parked their RV across the road. I thought about such local musical families as the Clines when I watched the Burns documentary.
Of course, Ted was only the county’s latest musical promoter. Buddy Boswell operated the Union Mill Opry near Edgerton from 1973 to 1996. The Boswell family and other local performers played there. Some are friends of mine and excellent musicians. But also, according to a St. Joseph newspaper story the performers also included Nashville country music stars such as the Wilburn Bothers, Mel Tillis, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Jim Ed Brown, Barbara Mandrell, Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells. Some of those legendary performers were at the fading end of careers, others the rising start. But they did grace the Union Mill stage.
Weston enjoyed a graceful period in the early 1990s when a music and arts colony coalesced among a group of friends and acquaintances. They returned the third floor of the Mettier Building on Main Street into Mettier Hall, a rectangular, brick-walled, ballroom and concert hall. The acoustics were fantastic. Jacob and Anna Mettier built the structure as a confectionary in 1847 and dedicated the third floor as a ballroom where the officers from Fort Leavenworth could meet the fair lasses of the county in a gentlemanly fashion. The arts group that restored it brought in some world-class acts, often folk music, from John Hartford to Jonathon Edwards. They also made room for local performers of note, too, such as Connie Dover.
The folk music roots that led to country music arrived with the first settlers and lingered. The late Joe Grable of Dearborn descended from a long line of fiddlers and played very well. His grandson took up the instrument and rose near the top often at the Platte County Fair fiddle contest. I played a gig in Weston years ago with Joe, and he announced he wished to play the Kentucky Waltz, because so many Platte settlers came from that state. He was right. But if you look at all the oldest tombstones in the county you’ll find Irish and German settlers, many who arrived with fiddles and ballads.
From 1950s honky tonk singers to the modern country rockers, the county has had singers head to Nashville to reach for stardom. Most came back to sing locally, never stars but appreciated by local folks. I suppose Outlaw Jim and the Whiskey Benders performing at Platte City’s recent Main Street Festival proves country still lives here.
Here’s to all the pickers, singers and music listeners in the county who keep the traditions alive, from the oldest banjo tunes to telecaster hot licks. Fads come and go, but various types of true country music get etched in mental stone, even in our hills, hollers and cul de sacs.